Craig Ulmer

Laser Sketcher

2014-12-12 edison

Tonight I used my Intel Edison to revive an old laser sketcher project I originally built for an "interfacing small computers" class nearly 20 years ago. This version is slow, crude, and low-res, but good enough to bring back some memories of previous work.


Interfacing Small Computers Class

Back in undergrad I took a class called "Interfacing Small Computers" that was all about connecting hardware to PCs of that era. It was a fun course that talked about a number of practical hardware/software design issues you had to deal with when developing cards that plugged into the PC's buses (AT, ISA, EISA, MCA,..). The labs were hard but fun- they used a special breakout board that routed all the signals from the ISA bus out to a large breadboard where you could connect in discrete logic chips. Students had to build circuits that decoded the bus's address signals, read/write the data bus, and do thing like trigger interrupts. On the host side we wrote dos drivers and simple applications in C to control the hardware. It was the most complicated breadboard work I've ever had to do (teaching me that designing a few 8-bit buses was a lot easier than wiring them up by hand).

In retrospect I was lucky to have taken the class at a time when you could still interface to a PC using a breadboard and TTL logic gates. Towards the end of the class we caught a glimpse of where I/O was heading- we started using Xilinx FPGAs to implement our bus handling logic. It wasn't long after this that PCI came out and ASICs/FPGAs became the only practical way to put your hardware on a bus.

Class Project

Towards the end of the quarter, my lab partner and I struggled to think of something we could build for the open-ended final lab project. In search of ideas, I talked to a friend of mine outside of school who had a knack for building interesting things. He said he'd just acquired an old, broken laser disc player that had some interesting parts I could have. In addition to having a bulky HeNe laser, the player had an X-Y mirror targeting system that was used to aim the laser at the right spot on the disc. The X-Y mirrors were a pretty clever design: all they did was place a mirror at the end of a slug in an inductor coil for each direction. The inductor moved the slug in or out of the coil depending on changes in current, so all you had to do was connect the coil to an analog output and change its voltage to position the mirror. The two mirror coils came in a single unit that were already oriented properly for X and Y reflections.


We went about building a simple board to feed the coils. The HeNe laser was too big (and had a dicey power supply), but luckily my friend also has a new, red laser diode I could use. We positioned it to hit the X-Y mirrors and fastened both to the board. Next, we used a pair of piggy-backed opamps to amplify the signals going to the inductors. Finally, we used a pair of 8-bit DACs to convert our digital data values to analog signals. We picked DACs that had built-in input registering. This meant that our ISA bus logic only had to generate signals to trigger the individual DACs to grab data off the ISA data bus when either the X or Y address appeared on the ISA address bus. Our design had to use a brand new Xilinx FPGA the lab had just received, so my parner ported the address decode logic to the FPGA.


I wrote some simple software for the host that continuously streamed coordinate data values to the mirror inductor coils (in retrospect, we should have buffered these in a buffer in the FPGA, but at the time, the FPGA was a big unknown). The mirror coilds probably weren't designed to run at high speeds, but we were able to stream data to them fast enough that we could render simple geometries like squares and circles. We got a lot of praise from others in the lab, as it was definitely a low-complexity, high-satisfaction project.

Reviving the Laser Sketcher with the Edison

After I finished the class, I didn't have a way to connect the sketcher to a computer because I didn't have an obvious way to stream data into the board. I looked at connecting it to a parallel port, but the whole thing got shelved because of time. After graduating, I thought about plugging the sketcher into an AVR embedded processor, but the AVRs didn't provide a way to change data vectors easily. The Intel Edison board lowered the effort bar so much that I didn't have an excuse to put this off anymore.


Connecting the laser sketcher up to the Edison was pretty easy. All I needed to do was find a way to supply analog X-Y signals to the amplifiers. The Arduino Edison board has a few pulse width modulation (PWM) pins that approximate an analog signal through pulse trains. The board had simple drivers for writing to the PWM generators, so all I had to do was create some data values and then stream them to the pins as fast as possible. The pulses make the output a little blocky, but are good enough for now. It'd probably be better to put a capacitor or opamp integrator w/ timed clearing in there to smooth the signal.